China's planning to archive 200 billion public Weibo posts

Photo: Burst/Unsplash.com

Everything from rants and mundane life updates to embarrassing confessions will soon be immortalised

For those of you who have ever posted on Weibo, your words (grammatical mistakes and all) will soon be a part of China's National Library archives. Yup, the National Library of China is set to archive over 200 billion Weibo posts as part of a non-profit project to preserve China’s digital heritage, according to the South China Morning Post. In a statement made by Rao Quan, Director of the National Library, this project will aid the 'long-term development of information security and the informatisation of society'.

Sina, the web portal that owns Weibo, was selected as the first partner for this initiative due to its huge pool of users and content – by the end of 2018, Weibo hit 462 million active users with over 500 billion comments and likes recorded on its platform, and over 210 million news stories and 1.3 billion pictures posted on Sina.com, according to Abacus News.

The data collected will be stored on Sina’s servers and will be jointly analysed by Sina and the National Library of China for policymaking and academic purposes.

While China is new to this initiative, similar projects have been carried out across the globe. In 2010, the US Library of Congress began archiving all tweets on Twitter in order to study how 'technology-based social networks form and evolve over time'. However, the number of tweets generated proved to be too overwhelming, and by the end of 2017, the effort was tweaked to only archive selected tweets. The plan to make the archive accessible to the public was also put on hold.

As for now, there are still many questions surrounding the archiving project here in China. It remains unclear how or when this whole process will be carried out, whether or not the archive will be available to the public, and how long the project will last, but with other Chinese internet companies already being invited to participate in the initiative, it's seemingly only a matter of time.

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